Episode #235 ... The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism - Byung Chul Han

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com/philosophize this if you wanna help keep the show a thing. Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there as well. Thanks to everyone, by the way, who's told a friend about this podcast over the years. Really appreciate it. Most of all, though, I hope you love the show today. So by this point, we've done three episodes on Byung Chul Han, and it can start to seem like the guy might just be a negative person, like, in general. Guy needs a, like, an edible arrangement sent to him or something. Cheer him up a bit. You know? I mean, think of all the criticism this guy brings into a room. My god. Always complaining about something going on in modern society. Apparently, we all live in a digital panopticon if you're him, something that most of us, I guess, don't even know that we're in, let alone us being capable of finding a way out of it. He says we have very little that binds or connects us together anymore as a species, that we have no shared understanding of truth anymore or of community. We don't even have shared stories to tie our lives together. That's what we talked about a couple episodes ago. In fact, I saw an interview with him one time where he said it's impossible to be someone who's thinking and paying attention to the world right now and to not be pessimistic about it. But is this statement telling the full story of the work of Byung Chohan and all that he has to say? Is it possible that this statement is true in a way? He does look out at the world and feel very pessimistic about where most things are headed, but that he also thinks there are certain choices people can make in life, certain ideas someone can pay attention to, or where there's actually a lot of hope for an individual that's willing to put in the time and effort. In 2002, long before Byung Chol Hana ever got famous for his criticism of the digital panopticon we live in, he wrote a book about Zen Buddhism. And being someone that's so well versed in both Mahayana Buddhism, as well as German idealism and most of Western philosophy, this book instantly became a respected cross cultural dialogue where he uses ideas from Zen Buddhism to show the limitations of many of the core ideas that are at the foundation of the modern Western subject. What I'm saying is, by the end of this episode, we're gonna understand how the burnout society and being trapped in a digital panopticon is something that's uniquely possible when your view of the world is rooted in a traditional western type of subjectivity. We're gonna look at the ways we often view ourselves in the West that amplify the effects of the burnout society, and we're gonna look at how we think …